The Cool Stuff from Google I/O 2017

Another Google I/O has happened and for those who didn’t have the opportunity to attend, here’s some of the most exciting stuff that was showcased and that I personally found really interesting.

Google I/O Keynote

Before jumping into sharing some highlights, here’s a video with Google I/O Keynote session. My advice is that you shouldn’t miss this one, even if it’s a bit more time demanding than the rest, it’s definitely worth watching.

What’s new in Android

Totally oriented to developers, here you’ll find what’s new coming for Android. Of course this is not everything presented in the talk but, in my opinion, these are some of the most interesting new products and features:

• Picture in Picture
• Multi-Display
• WebView
• Fonts
• TextView Auto-sizing
• Kotlin
• Physics Animation

Kotlin

This was mentioned previously, and most of you already use or know about Kotlin, so now you can rejoice, as it is officially on Android! This is great news, since having a fresh and powerful language supported by Google may improve even more how we program for Android. I’ll be taking a more detailed look into it, in my own time, to see how it works ( I suggest you to do the same!). And, as usual, Google as always being helpful – Getting Started with Kotlin.

What’s new in Android Wear & Best Practices

For our team at Exaud, this is always a topic to watch out for, as we need to keep ourselves updated, in order to have success with our TypeIt Wear SMS app – besides that, we always strive to have the best Android can offer. So, what spiked our interest in this talk?

• Usage of Google Assistant through your smartwatch
• Improvements to Complications
• Material design guidelines
• Android O TextView auto-sizing will be available on Android wear
• App deployment to the PlayStore, one of the major hassles that has appeared with Android Wear 2.0 was that we needed to have various apks in different ways to support both Wear 1.0 and 2.0. Soon, we will be able to deploy to 1.0 as we deploy to 2.0!
• Battery optimization guidelines

Developing High Performance Games for Android

This one is really a personal interest, as on my spare time I love to game, although mainly PC, and I am always interested in the Gaming industry. Nowadays, we’re seeing Android games becoming huge, more and more complex due to almost everyone owning a smartphone and every device being more powerful than before.

Of course that Android games aren’t something where you get really serious about, but as a developer, you may want to give the user a visually appealing experience and you need to take good care of how you do that with the available resources. This is an interesting session about what you could use to optimize your game and what you should look for when doing it.

Google Lens

Now this is something that I’m really looking forward to try out as an Android user. You probably remember the Google Glass from some years ago, right? What a great idea, but unfortunately didn’t go too well and even if it did, I think it would have probably been successful only to a niche market.

Now, with Google Lens, you just need your smartphone and you can use it to tell you information about stuff that you point your camera at, in conjunction with Google Assistant. This is really a great step forward in the usage of Image Recognition and Machine Learning. Check the announcement here. Let’s hope this one doesn’t fall short!

If You Want To Learn More

If you want to know more about what was announced at this year’s Google I/O, you can easily check out the links below:

• Google Developers Youtube Channel
• Android Developers Youtube Channel
• Firebase Youtube Channel

Or, if you just want to take a quick look at everything that has been announced, you can check Google’s post with all the news that were made during the event.

Hope you’ve enjoyed my recommendations, if you’re interested in this topic, feel free to reach me at joao[at]exaud[dot]com